In current practice, items purchased or intended for purchase by a customer in a supermarket or like establishment or other point of sale are typically carried or transported by the customer, by hand or in a cart or other user-displaceable carrier, to a checkout counter or register at which a cashier attends to those operations necessary to suitably record the purchase. To this end the cashier generally takes up each item or article being purchased, one at a time, records the item price either by hand on a keypad or with the assistance of a bar code scanner or the like, and then immediately places each article on a conveyor belt or checkout counter surface or chute from which the articles can thereafter be bagged or packed for transport from the store, by the customer, after payment of the total charges for the customer's purchases. To pack the articles for such transport, the customer or cashier or other store employee manually grasps a bag from a typically stacked supply thereof and, after manipulating the bag open (and, if necessary, continuing to manually hold the bag in its open condition), individually picks up each article, in turn, from the conveyor or counter surface or chute and places the article into the open bag. When, after a time, the open bag becomes full, it is removed by hand to a remote location and another bag is likewise manually grasped, opened and positioned for the receipt of additional articles therewithin.
These operations consume an unnecessarily lengthy period of time and their slow and repetitive nature are among the major causes of customer-irritating congestion in supermarkets and the like where long lines of customers waiting to be processed through the checkout counters are today an extremely common sight. In an effort to reduce the inconvenience and delay to customers, the cashier may at times be assisted by another employee whose job it is to place the customer-selected articles into bags as the cashier records their purchase, thus minimizing distractions to the customer's attention during the article recording and payment steps and so that, once these operations are completed, the bags have been filled and are ready for the customer to transport from the store. The provision of a cashier's assistant, however, in addition to representing additional staffing costs to the supermarket, tends to prove unsatisfactory to the customer in that the assistant--in an effort to keep pace with the cashier's recording of the articles being purchased and thus bagging the articles in the same random order in which the cashier picks them up and passes them on--generally introduces the articles into the bags without regard to their type or other pertinent attributes and thereby notably increases the risk that the packed articles will be broken, squashed, polluted or otherwise damaged during subsequent transport of the filled bags.